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I am no expert on what goes into making a 'voice'. I do know the file for a good voice is typically about 500 Mb. So I assume it must be a difficult, challenging task and why I have never seen software to create your own voices.
Since English has something over 100,000 words and I don't know if that includes names for people or places, it is amazing how well it does. I have even made up words in imaginary languages (including letters 'borrowed' from other languages like German and Spanish) and as long as you have a reasonable mix of vowels and consonants; it does a remarkably good job of pronouncing them without a hesitation.
The only place the software ever has problems is with common words that have several different pronunciations. It seems like it screws them up a lot, but I'm sure it just you only notice when it uses the wrong one. Among the most annoying ones are 'minute' (it seems to prefer the pronunciation for a small quantity when 98% of the time you really want the word referring to a unit of time), read (it defaults to the present tense, when I usually want the past tense), and it annoying spells out h m m rather than saying hmm. Some of these you can fix by tweaking the wording (like typing 'red' when you want the past tense of 'read') and some you can fix with their learning function (that I have always been to lazy to learn). But again it all just takes time, if you are trying to tweak something that is hundreds of pages long. So I have just learned to live with a small percentage of mispronunciations.
I have been using this software for 4-5 years, but I really don't know how it works other than it can't be a simple look up table, as the pronunciation of words will change to some extent with context. In particular, if the sentence ends with a question mark, the voice changes the inflection so you hear the sentence is a question.
Duane
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